Why do the Hugos matter? No one really knows. Literary awards are usually judged by a group of experienced critics, academics, and/or writers who put some work into reading widely and trying to evaluate literary quality. The Hugos are chosen by notably provincial SF fans who are typically from the US and who paid $50 for the privilege of voting. Yet the Hugos are still referred to as science fiction's highest award and recommended to people as if they represent books that people may want to read.
My concern with the Hugos is as a list of recommendations for readers. Every now and then someone decides that it would be interesting to read the major books in SF and they naturally think that maybe they should start with the Hugo list and read one from each year. They shouldn't.
I'm going to go through the list of Hugo novel winners and pick out which novel should have won in each year. What makes me a good critic, or at least a better than the combined opinion of Hugo voters? Not much, but frankly it does not take much. I've read somewhat widely in SF and fantasy and I'm at least aware of what literary fiction is in a way that Hugo voters do not seem to be (I will get to the much discussed case of Gravity's Rainbow around 1973.) There are going to be holes in my recommendations because I am still from the US and have not yet gotten around to reading Italo Calvino or the Strugatsky brothers. For the purpose of this initial list I'm not even going to look at the winners of SF's juried awards and crib off of them: I may do that at some later time.
Since the Hugos are supposed to be about popularity, I'm going to consider popularity to at least some extent. As explained below, this is for the time being a list that only chooses winners for the 20th century.
Eligibility
I am going to consider which novel should have won, whether or not it was nominated for that year. For the purpose of doing this, I had to figure out the Hugo award's eligibility rules. To summarize:
* each Hugo award is for works first published in the year before that, sometimes for a longer period
* works published that are not in English are eligible in their first year of English translation
* serialized works can only win once, either for one element of the series or the whole series with its last installment
* one of the specific ways in which eligibility can be extended is that works are eligible up to their first year of US publication if they were first published outside the US.
* there are rules that only science fiction cares about concerning the differences in length between novels, novellas, and novelettes that I may or may not follow.
Lastly, there is one mind-boggling element listed in the Hugo award rules: the Hugo awards are apparently not for SF after all. A breezy subheader called "Science Fiction? Fantasy? Horror?" says that works of fantasy or horror are also eligible. I had originally looked at the list of Hugo winners and decided that they must have changed the rules to make fantasy eligible in 2000 (there are very few fantasy works nominated before this). It seems clear to me, given that the change around 2000 was so notable, that the Hugos are awards for a marketing category -- in other words, the books placed in the science fiction section of a US bookstore that are now a mixture of SF and fantasy with fantasy predominating. As such I'm going to choose which works should have won the Hugos as if fantasy was always eligible: horror gets a different couple of shelves in the bookstore so I will leave that out.
The 1950s
Amusingly the Hugos started in the 1950s and therefore left out SF's "Golden Age" (1938-1946) entirely. Don't worry, you are not really missing much.
1953: The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester , eligibility 1952-1953
my pick: same
After all I've written about the Hugos, they arguably got it right for the first ever one. The Demolished Man is probably better than Bester's other major work and since it concerns a mentally ill oligarch who has to be taken down it is still relevant. People will have heard of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury a lot more but it is not actually a better work.
1955: They'd Rather Be Right (aka The Forever Machine), Mark Clifton & Frank Riley, eligibility 1954-1955
my pick: The Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien
The whole trilogy was first published 1954-1955. Not many people may have heard of this obscure work, but it's better than whatever the Hugo process picked out.
1956: Double Star, Robert A. Heinlein, eligibility 1954-1956 but I will only consider 1956
my pick: Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis
Alternatively, The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis was published 1956 so I could have chosen the entire Narnia series but the work above is for adults and is better.
1958: The Big Time, Fritz Leiber, eligibility 1957-1958
my pick: The Languages of Pao, Jack Vance
I've read The Big Time and it is an absolutely horrible work that should be forgotten. That is not to say that Fritz Leiber is a bad writer: he is going to be long remembered for the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories but not for this. The Hugos don't seem to have picked much Vance even when he wrote SF, inexplicably.
1959: A Case of Conscience, James Blish, eligibility 1958
my pick: The Zimiamvian trilogy, E.R. Eddison
People may start complaining that my list is too fantasy dominated but what can I do -- The Mezentian Gate published in 1958 is the last element of the Zimiamvian trilogy, which is far better than anything Blish ever wrote. That includes A Case of Conscience, which is incidentally one of the most morally and ethically objectionable genocide justifying books that SF has ever produced which is saying a lot.
This was the first Hugo with runner-up nominations.
,
1960: Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein , eligibility 1959
my pick: Titus Alone, Mervyn Peake or The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
Neither of these are fantasy works: Titus Alone has an actual surveillance drone in it and if Arthur C. Clarke invented satellites then Peake probably invented drones. But of course the Gormenghast series, which Titus Alone is the last of, is better as writing than anything that Heinlein ever wrote. The Sirens of Titan was nominated for a Hugo this year and I should acknowledge that this time they at least nominated something that plausibly should have won.
Hugo score for the 1950s: 1 out of 6
The 1960s
The 1960s were the time of religious and ecological SF in the US, and were also when 3 of the best SF writers produced many of their major works -- Philip K. Dick. Ursula K. LeGuin, and Stanislaw Lem. Going by the Hugo criterion of first publication in English, Lem's works do not show up in the 1960s although they should: I will try to drop them into later decades. This decade's works were dominated by SF instead of fantasy as with the 1950s, and involved the first actually difficult decisions that I encountered. All Hugos for this decade had the previous year as their eligibility period.
1961: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
my pick: Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
Rogue Moon was one of the nominees: it's not a great book but it's better than the Hugo winner. I also considered A Fine and Private Place by Peter S.
Beagle.
1962: Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
my pick: same
This was amazingly popular and gives a feel for the religious SF of the time: I think that it's amusing that it's likely to be the only Heinlein that makes my list because in terms of general writing quality it is not very good.
1963: The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
my pick: same
The Hugos are really going strong here: two in a row!
1964: Way Station, Clifford D. Simak
my pick: Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Cat's Cradle was nominated, so the Hugos are still doing pretty well.
1965: The Wanderer, Fritz Leiber
my pick: Martian Time-Slip, Philip K. Dick
I don't know why people kept voting in minor works by Leiber. Martian Time-Slip is a foundational work about the abandonment of people who are disabled, depressed, or old.
1966: tie between This Immortal, Roger Zelazny and Dune, Frank Herbert
my pick: Dune, Frank Herbert
The Hugos came so close but had to make this a tie. This Immortal by Roger Zelazny is fine: I've read almost everything Zelazny has written and it's not his best but it's OK. Dune was both popular and influential as one of the first major SF works to actually consider that alternate societies and ecosystems to "generic US or medieval Europe" might exist. If there was going to be a tie, it should have been with The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by PKD.
1967: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
my pick: the totally incongruous combination of Giles Goat-Boy, John Barth, or The Master and Margarita, Mikhail
Bulgakov
The 1966 publication year was an extremely difficult one to choose from. The Hugos nominated Babel-17 by Samuel Delany which was certainly in the running, but Giles Goat-Boy was one of the first popular metafictional / postmodern novels. The Master and Margarita is in no real sense "a novel of the sixties" and was written between 1928-1940, but this was the year of its first English publication so in it goes.
1968: Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
my pick: same
I might argue here but I wrote that I'd go along with the Hugos when they were close enough.
1969: Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
my pick: Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch or A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Brunner wrote some good books but this one should not have won for this year. The year also had Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by PKD which also would have been better.
1970: The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
my pick: same
The year had PKD's Ubik, which usually would have won but not against this competition.
Hugo score for the 1960s: 4.5 out of 10. I'm guessing this will be the best decade ever for the award.
The 1970s
The 1970s were the decade in which people questioned the whole direction of SF as a genre, mostly particularly with a push to integrate SF into literary fiction. The experimentalist fiction of the New Wave was the closest thing SF has had to an avant-garde. People also started to point out how homophobic classical SF was and push a more feminist SF (one classic marker being The Female Man, Joanna Russ, 1975). In general, this was a direction not followed in later decades, with the movie Star Wars (1977) signaling a change in SF from written to visual media and a corresponding reversion back to a more pulp style.
1971: Ringworld, Larry Niven
my pick: Solaris, Stanislaw Lem (first English translation 1970)
The conparison between these two is particularly harsh because they are both supposedly hard SF writers. It's just that one is "hard" by convention (how does the Ringworld material stand up under stress? Should the writer handwave something no don't bother, um, it's very hard) and one is the best hard SF writer ever, who wrote a whole oeuvre about the limits of science and how science actually works.
1972: To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip José Farmer
my pick: The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin
This was at least nominated for a Hugo.
1973: The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov
my pick: The Iron Dream, Norman Spinrad
Which should you choose, someone who you want to reward for work they did in the Golden Age, or someone who wrote a work that essentially destroys the Golden Age? I'm not going to forget The Iron Dream and I can barely recall what differentiates The Gods Themselves from similar works.
1974: Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
my pick: Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Before I get to Gravity's Rainbow, I'll mention that two Stanislaw Lem books, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The
Invincible, were both first translated into English in 1973. While Clarke was writing a classic Big Dumb Object book Lem was in print with SF's first use of nanomachines (in The Invincible). Both Lem books were better than anything written within the genre that year.
But what about outside the genre? There was a moment in 1973 when Gravity's Rainbow was nominated for a Nebula Award when it seemed like literary fiction and SF might be converging, in which SF would no longer be a ghettoized genre and be evaluated in literary terms. That did not happen. For a longer treatment of this theme, read Jonathan Lethem about it-- this is from a 1998 Village Voice article, but he's written the same in many other places.
In between Gravity's Rainbow and the end of the 20th century, each famous US literary author wrote approximately one SF novel. In terms of technical writing skill, these were of course better than what SF writers could do: in terms of understanding SF ideas and the history of the genre, they were abysmal. I'm going to ignore most of them.
1975: The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
my pick: same
As an anarchist I'm supposed to especially like this anarchist novel: I do not -- it is one of the most deprived and disappointing anarchies envisioned. But it's a good book. Quite possibly this should have been the year for Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (first year of English translation) but I haven't read it.
1976: The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
my pick: Dhalgren, Samuel Delany
I really like The Forever War and I would like to just agree with this Hugo, but I can't. Bonus pick: if you want something as end-of-the-Vietnam-War as The Forever War, but quite possibly a bit better, there is also The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson also published 1975.
1977: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm
my pick: The Cornelius Quartet, Michael Moorcock
I considered and rejected Ratner's Star by Dom DeLillo: the Cornelius quartet (the first four Jerry Cornelius novels, now generally bound into a single volume) are a pure distillation of what the English New Wave was.
1978: Gateway, Frederik Pohl
my pick: A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick
Gateway is a fairly good book, but A Scanner Darkly captured an era.
1979: Dreamsnake, Vonda N. McIntyre
my pick: same
I thought of The Chain of Chance but this list is already overpopulated with time-shifted Lem books.
1980: The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke
my pick: On Wings of Song, Thomas
M. Disch
This was at least nominated for a Hugo. Runner-up: Engine Summer by John Crowley.
Hugo score for the 1970s: 2 out of 10.
The 1980s
The 1980s were a fragmented decade for SF -- they were certainly the decade of the emergence of cyberpunk, but the list of authors who have written cyberpunk that will last is a bit thin: it's William Gibson for a book that essentially created the subgenre for the public, and Bruce Sterling. The end of the decade saw the first SF books by Iain M. Banks, part of what I consider to be a renaissance of politically left writing from UK authors.
1981: The Snow Queen, Joan D. Vinge
my pick: Return From the Stara, Stanislaw Lem (first English translation)
This should be the last time-shifted Lem book.
1982: Downbelow Station, C. J. Cherryh
my pick: Little, Big by John Crowley
Little, Big was at least nominated for a Hugo. In almost any other year, Lanark by Alasdair Gray would have been my pick.
1983: Foundation's Edge, Isaac Asimov
my pick: The Sword of the Lictor, Gene Wolfe (standing in some way for the entire Book of the New Sun)
The last Gene Wolfe book in the series was published in the next year, but this was the year in one of them was nominated for a Hugo so I will stick with this one.
1984: Startide Rising, David Brin
my pick: the Dying Earth series, Jack Vance
My pick would have been The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe but it is not really a standalone book and the third book in the series was nominated for a Hugo in the last year. Therefore I chose Cugel's Saga, published 1983, as the end (in terms of novels) of Jack Vance's Dying Earth series.
This year is as good as any to mark the start of a trend of popular fantasy series that are more of less open ended and that end when their writers can no longer write. In particular, this year has the first Terry Pratchett Discworld book, The Colour of Magic, and the first Steven Brust Dragaeran book, Jherag. I would expect these to win some kind of series award at some point, but not for any of the individual novels in the series.
1985: Neuromancer, William Gibson
my pick: same
1986: Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
my pick: Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling
It's understandable that SF fans would like a book in which adults watch a child kick another child to death so that the child can be prepared to naturally accept genocide as a way to win, but Ender's Game is not actually a good book in any sense. Schismatrix is better read as a later book, Schismatrix Plus which adds a number of short stories, but since this is a list of awards for novels I decided on the earlier version.
I would have liked to fit something by Brian Aldiss in here, such as Helliconia Winter standing for the whole Helliconia series or Hothouse in the previous year, but those are the tail end of the New Wave and this is the time of cyberpunk.
1987: Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card
my pick: The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood notably does not consider her works to be SF, but in a category that spans SF and fantasy they should be in there somewhere.
1988: The Uplift War, David Brin
my pick: Consider Phlebas, Iain M.. Banks
The first of Iain Banks' Culture books. Not his best, but better than anything else at the time. This is usually classed as a space opera: I think it's better classified as a form of anarchist SF.
This year also has Soldiers of Paradise, the first book by Paul Park. Some book by Paul Park should be on this list somewhere but popularity is part of even a fake Hugo list and I don't think that his books ever got the attention that they deserved.
1989: Cyteen, C. J. Cherryh
my pick: Islands in the Net, Bruce Sterling
This was at least nominated for a Hugo.
1990: Hyperion, Dan Simmons
my pick: The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks
Probably Banks' second best book.
Hugo score for the 1980s: 1 out of 10.
The 1990s
The 1990s were a decade of decline for written SF. A larger and larger number of novels were published: fewer and fewer had any particular kind of literary quality. For some previous decades it was a challenge to pick the best work in a year: for this one it's a challenge to pick anything.Lois McMaster Bujold is a perennial favorite for this decade of Hugos. I've read and enjoyed all of her books: as with any everlasting series, they don't seem individually better than the others or rising to the quality of something I could recommend as a single work.
1991: The Vor Game,
Lois McMaster
Bujold
my pick: Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks
Probably Banks' best book and certainly should have won this year.
1992: Barrayar, Lois
McMaster Bujold
my pick: The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
The definitive steampunk - as - cyberpunk book.
1993:
Doomsday Book, Connie Willis, and A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge
my pick: same
I am not enthused by either of these but I can't find anything better. I might have chosen Red Mars but another book in its series won the Hugo next year. I really should have chosen The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison but it wasn't published in the US until 2004 and for a US dominated award like the Hugos should probably win in a later year.
1994: Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
my pick: same
Red Mars was a better book, but I will defer to the Hugos since it's close enough.
1995: Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold
my pick: A History Maker, Alasdair Gray
This one would have been Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. Le Guin but it is classed as a collection of short stories. There is a trend through the rest of this decade (and to some extent for the rest of SF's existence so far) of ignoring work from the UK because it is not as well known in the US or not even published in the US.
1996: The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
my pick: Fairyland, Paul McAuley
1997: Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
my pick: Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling
This was nominated for a Hugo and is one of Sterling's best books.
1998: Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman
my pick: nothing
I looked diligently over the list of books published in 1997 and couldn't find anything that seemed worth putting on this list. I guess I'll count this as agreement with the Hugos but really this could have been a year for no award.
1999: To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis
my pick: anything else
I will try not to write too much about the book that won, written as it was in a sentimental style that infiltrated the plot to the extent of characters saving a cat at the risk of destroying the historical timeline. There are a good number of books better than this one published this year: they include A Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler, The Book of Knights, Yves Mayanrd, and A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin. I will count this as disagreement with the Hugos since it should have preferably gone to any of those.
2000: A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
my pick: A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold
It seems like a joke that I would choose a book by Bujold after disagreeing with the Hugos so many times about them before, but there is a particular reason why this one should win: there is a trend in popular fantasy / SF that begins around this time in mashing up genres or reworking famous characters, and this book is a successful SF version of a Regency romance.
Hugo score for the 1990s: 3 out of 10.
The 2000s Through Now
I don't think that I can trust my own judgement to make a list of winners from this point forward. I was discouraged by the state of SF in the late 1990s and stopped reading as much of it. There were certainly authors that I continued to read, and I could assign a number of years to China Mieville or Adam Roberts. But I really haven't read enough of the field to be as confident of who should have won in each year. For instance, I still haven't read any N.K. Jemison. Here is a list of works that I think should have been at least nominated, by year of publication instead of eligibility year:
2001: Perdido Street Station, China Mieville
2002: Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan
2003: Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
2004: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke and The Scar, China Mieville
2007: Land of the Headless, Adam Roberts
2009: Anathem, Neil Stephanson
2010: New Model Army, Adam Roberts, the city & the city, China Mieville
2011: By Light Alone, Adam Roberts, Kraken, China Mieville, The Half-Made World, Felix Gilman
2012: Embassytown, China Mieville
2013: The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks
2014: The Islanders, Christopher Priest
2016: Europe in Winter, Dave Hutchinson
2017: The Thing Itself, Adam Roberts
2018: Above the Snowline, Steph Swainston
2022: The This, Adam Roberts
I may add to this at some later time if I read more.
Total Score for the 20th Century Hugo novel awards
Rounding up, this gives the Hugos a total score of 12 good picks out of 46 awards, or 26%. If you had gone back to the Hugo list of novels that won in the 20th century, you would have had a 1/4 chance of getting the best one for each year.
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